Product Title Formating Question
-
The majority of the products I sell require lengthy product titles, I have 600+ items that have titles over 70+ characters. In the interest of reducing the character count (Product Feeds) I'm trying to eliminate unnecessary "stop words" in the titles, such as "and", "with" etc..
I've listed an example of a current product listing below, followed by two different formats to reduce the character count. Which one if any is better for SEO or should I leave my titles alone and stick with my original format?
Current Listing Example:
- DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses with Black Frame and Clear Anti-Fog Lens
Suggested Listing Example:
- DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses-Black Frame-Clear Anti-Fog Lens
- DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses/Black Frame/Clear Anti-Fog Lens
-
Hi James,
I agree 100% with your statement. I wanted to get the SEOmoz communities opinion on my product title changes to see if my ideas are worth implementing.
-
Don't miss the obvious - title is a conversion tool not just for SEO. This is what makes your customers click on your page in SERPs and on your category pages. You should consider making the titles (and meta descriptions) better at "selling the click" not just from a keyword SEO point-of-view..
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your quick response.
My product titles are formated by Brand-Style Name-Product Type-Product Feature. It's much easier for a human to read and seems to work well for long-tail searches. These products are also nested in a keyword optimized section page.
I appreciate your advice, but I want to keep the names easier for humans to read.
-
HiMEldridge,
Stopwords can be removed from the title but it's always necessary. For the case you gave, I would dig into search volume of product base name, or brand name, with your additional features : black frame and anti-fog lens.
You get a more clean title with the focus on the main article (DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses) and you can put the additional properties in the page, close to the page title. You may also use your lengthy title on the H1/H2 of the site and use the smaller one for the head title, giving your page more variations on the product name.
Of course if the search volume for product + property exists, I would only remove the stop words.
-
I agree that 'with' and 'and' are unnecessary.I would delete the '-' and '/' and just use a string of words:
DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens
From an SEO point of view you need to ask yourself what phrases users who are looking for that product would search for. The category (safety glasses)? the brand (DeWalt)? I doubt they would search for marketing words like "Dual Comfort" or things that seem secondary "clear".
I would play with the Google Keyword tool and see if there are any surprising matches. Actually, I just did and found that "safety glasses" is by far the most common term from the above set. I would be tempted to put the category first, followed by the brand, and then maybe some secondary words.
Safety Glasses DeWalt Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens
-
I've recently done this with our products. A few things to keep in mind:
-"The advantage to keeping within that limit is just the fact that the user can read the entire thing"
-The most important keywords should be first.
-I don't think that slashes or dashes are necessary.
-Keywords should have some sort of search volume that drives relevant traffic to your pages.
That's all I've got for now.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonicalising a product with multiple variants
I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed. There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation? EXAMPLE: Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonKenworthy0 -
Duplicated content by the product pages
Hi,Do you thing those pages have duplicate content:https://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards-401.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-401.html.And also how much impact will it have on a panda update?I'm trying to figure out if all the product pages, (that are in the same way as the ones above) are the reson for a Panda Penalty
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Author Byline Question
What's the best practice for displaying author information at the beginning of an article? We're presently displaying it as: By <Author> • Jan 16, 2015 • <City>. We're considering making it even more concise by removing the term 'By'. Would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did this? Any other ways we should optimize?
On-Page Optimization | | TheaterMania0 -
Question About On Page Grades
New to the whole SEO game in some aspects and wanted to know about on page grades. Some of the pages I got ranks of F for are actually in the top 10 in Google. Could anyone help me to explain way these pages/tags are F's with those rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | BlackEnterprise0 -
Writing Service/Product Descriptions
Hi, I work for a site that allows people to book a variety of different services in different locations (mainly hair and beauty related). The site is still in development so I can't link to it I'm afraid. My colleague is about to start writing these descriptions for each of the beauty salons we have signed up and I thought I'd take the opportunity to check what everyone else thought about these descriptions. As far as I'm concerned, a near perfect example can be found at http://www.toptable.co.uk/fishers-in-the-city We have about 100 words at the most, so I was thinking that as long as we get in the name of the salon, the location (being more descriptive than the general area our services search function allows for) and the USP of each salon - their specialty services. Is there anything else you'd include? Foremost, I want this to be as descriptive as possible to offer more detailed information about the salon. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Using product prices in title tags & other ways to improve CTR
I'm about to launch a new website and was just wondering if anyone had tried this before; On product pages i thought it may be a good idea to include prices, with a message to save more when the customer buys more. Something along the lines of this; [Product name] at/from [Brand name] - Only [Price] [Buy # to save] Etc. Does anyone have any experience with using this in title tags (along with some variation of offering a saving when bulk buying) etc? Any comments would be hugely appreciated! Thanks! [EDIT] Should also just note that we are very competitive on pricing - Looked at more than 70 competitors and we're offering better quality products (than the ones from [supposedly top] competitors we've sampled) for lower prices.
On-Page Optimization | | tea0 -
Strange titles showing in WMT?
On one of my wordpress sites, I have just checked it out in Google Webmaster tools and under duplicate titles it is showing spam titles which I did not add? Lamisil Buy - Buy Online on two pages of the site However these two pages are no longer online? So I have 2 quick questions please 1.) How did they add a title to these 2 pages 2.) Why is it still showing in WMT when these pages are no longer live? Also under duplicate titles it is showing pages that dont exist? i.e. ?yonidza=orde and some of which such as weddings.html are pages from the old site structure that no longer exist - how can I reduce these errors down?
On-Page Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Best Layout for Product Page SEO
Hi I am looking to revamp my website and would like to know your views on the best product layout for SEO - in particular if it better to have tabulated content like play.com http://goo.gl/4xdqp or non tabulated content like Amazon. http://goo.gl/cojKj Are there any pros or cons to each approach? I believe tabulated looks better and is easier to navigate but do the engines see this as hidden text? I have been told this is an issue with expandable divs. Many thanks David
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0